Jun 8, 2011 5:57 PM

Gallery: New Telescope Opens Big Eye to Southern Skies

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messier-17-the-swan-nebula
Looking up from Chile’s arid Atacama Desert, home to some of the clearest starscapes on Earth, a massive new telescope has taken its first breathtaking photos of the southern night sky. The [VLT Survey Telescope](http://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/surveytelescopes/vst.html), or VST, uses a 268-megapixel camera. Over the next five years it will capture 150 terabytes worth of visible-light data, supplement existing surveys and help astronomers study the universe in fresh detail. On June 8, astronomers released the first two VST images. One is a 660-megabyte portrait of the Swan Nebula (above). The other is an equally detailed shot of Omega Centauri, a star-rich globular cluster sometimes called the jewel of the southern night sky. In this gallery we’ll show you the telescope and what it took to create these colossal space photos. *Image: ESO/INAF-VST/OmegaCAM \[[high-resolution version available](http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1119a/)\]*
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time-lapse-vst-observations
Observation Night ----------------- Time-lapse footage of the VST in action. *Videos: ESO/Stéphane Guisard*

Gianluca Lombardi
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vlt-survey-telescope-vst
Inside the VLT Survey Telescope ------------------------------- The telescope opens for business at sunset (above). Schematics of the survey unit’s side and front (below) reveal its scale and inner structure. [![](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2011/06/vlt-unit-shcmeatic-eso.jpg "vlt-unit-shcmeatic-eso")](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2011/06/vlt-unit-shcmeatic-eso.jpg) *Images: 1) ESO/G. Lombardi \[[high-resolution version available](http://www.eso.org/public/images/vst_lombardi_4/)\] 2) ESO \[[high-resolution version available](http://www.eso.org/sci/facilities/paranal/telescopes/ut/)\]*
04
omegacam
OmegaCAM -------- At the heart of the VST is a nearly 1-ton camera called OmegaCAM (above). It uses a 268-million-pixel bed of image sensors (below) to take highly detailed images. [![](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2011/06/omegacam-ccd-sensors-vst.jpg "omegacam-ccd-sensors-vst")](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2011/06/omegacam-ccd-sensors-vst.jpg) *Images: ESO/INAF-VST/OmegaCAM/O. Iwert \[high-resolution versions available: [top](http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1119d/), [bottom](http://www.eso.org/public/images/04_omegacam_2004-12/)\]*

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vst-all-sky-survey
Surveying the Night Sky ----------------------- Astronomers will use the telescope to make three highly detailed surveys of the southern sky. The target regions are color-coded here in red, green and blue. *Image: ESO \[[high-resolution version available](http://www.eso.org/public/images/allsky-vst/)\]*
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omega-centauri-vst
Omega Centauri -------------- The second photo snapped by VST includes more than 300,000 stars in the Omega Centauri globular cluster. *Image: ESO/INAF-VST/OmegaCAM \[[high-resolution version available](http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1119b/)\]*

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